So if y’all ain’t heard, Hermione Granger is black. *milly rocks*

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play that continues the story of Harry, Hermione, and Ron’s wizardly triad nineteen years after the final book ends, announced the actors cast in the roles and–gasp!–one of them is black.

Norma Dumezweni has an impressive acting resume and, as Hypable notes, “Having a black Hermione was already a popular idea adopted by the Harry Potter fandom as a logical fit for the character and a way to add diversity to the books, so this casting choice is sure to make people very happy!”

Well, most people.

Y’all, when I say the white tears flowed…you could’ve remade Point Break in my mentions. Honestly, I avoided Harry Potter fandom from the jump because of the pervasive misogyny and racist foolery. It got worse each time J.K. Rowling said a major character was gay (in her head) or wizarding students might could be Jewish (I guess in her draft notes?). And #neverforget when Lavender Brown got hit with the Caucasia spell, folks found out Cho Chang wasn’t white, and uppity fans had the audacity to imagine Hermione as anything other than a whiter shade of pale. HP forums looked like Klan rallies. People lost their shit then. They’re losing it now. If nothing else, the consistency is remarkable. The train to White Supremacist Hogwarts is never late.

Y'all. This dude's dick's so bent over a fictional character he's on the interwebs SEARCHING for ppl to harass. LOL pic.twitter.com/UDn8IZDa3E

By the way, he started off his attempted colonization of my timeline by calling me a cunt and saying that nobody cared about my “black opinions” but he tweeted at me for a good while after he’d been blocked. Hmm. Something about my black cuntiness kept him coming back. He should ask his daddy about that.

*ahem*

Here’s something else to consider. Even with Rowling saying she didn’t write her with a specific race in mind and she “loves black Hermione”, she could’ve said, “Hey, have we looked at anybody besides little white girls?” during casting the first film adaptation, pressed for more diversity in casting throughout the seven subsequent films, or–and this is where it gets really radical–put that diversity on the page clear as flipping day in the first place so there would be no question about her intentions, therefore freeing us to gleefully drag Racist Reading is Fundamental Twitter when shit like this pops off.

But whatever. Stay mad!

For the most part, save for a few sad losers who should’ve been gargled and spit instead of fertilized, my timeline exploded in celebratory emojis, gifs, and virtual dance parties. It was glorious.

Until you realize it’s the not-so-rags-to-even-richer tale of a White Dude who decided to leave the ad world and dive into young adult writing (because how hard could that be really) and while he’s at it, completely transform how girl characters are written because so far nobody has been able to get it right.

And what had international auction houses and movie studios creaming themselves? Had to be something mindblowing that would shock the industry to get this kind of attention, right? Nope. A story with literally thin characterization–fat girl sheds pounds and gains badassery–and the plot points of a zillion different “troubled White Girl” espionage thrillers before it.

Eh. That’s the gist. But I encourage you to read it and draw your own conclusions.

So Writer Twitter did its thing with an assist from Book and Reader Twitter and formed a GTFOH Voltron that rightfully excoriated this bullshit down to the bone. Hence #MorallyComplicatedYA was born (shout out to @PunkinOnWheels for its creation). There’s some really fantastic stuff there strongly refuting the aforementioned soon-to-be YA’s Next Big Thing’s asinine assertion that his book fulfills the genre’s dearth of morally complex and ambiguous material and strong, girl characters.

BITCH WAYER

And while this latest round of bile-inducing praise being heaped upon yet another White Male YA Savior is worthy of the epic dragging it’s receiving, somewhere around the third or fourth tongue-in-cheek joke lobbed to the TL, shit stopped being funny. At least for me.Because what I wasn’t seeing in the conversations was any discussion of the big, old white elephant in the room.

So I started talking. First about the sexism, one of my intersections. And while I got a ton of faves and RTs for comments about the patriarchy,

What White Men say as they walk through doors women opened & get paid more than women on deals brokered by women. https://t.co/O2Hon9upvf

when it came down to another intersection, my blackness, and asking White women to examine how devastating their privilege is, particularly in the women-dominated publishing industry, it was basically *crickets*.

And I didn’t even really dig into what representation looks like for the various other intersections that I embody or for the multitudes of multi-faceted, supremely talented writers of color who are routinely turned away from publishing’s gates. There’s countless studies out there that provide hard data but I can tell you from lived experience as a lifelong reader and writer that it’s shitty. And it’s getting worse, even as awareness increases.

So while it’s extremely important to lift our voices and let publishing know we’re sick to death of being told the women who consistently write amazing books and create complex, multi-layered, characters don’t mean shit compared to the latest Mediocre White Dude, here’s what everyone keeps glossing over: nearly everyone involved in making publishing decisions is a white woman.

Let me say that again for those in the back:

NEARLY EVERYONE INVOLVED IN MAKING PUBLISHING DECISIONS IS A WHITE WOMAN

The same folks on my TL who shame women Tea Partiers and Republicans for voting against their own interests and the interests of other women don’t even blink at these White women in publishing and affiliated industries who elevate White men above all else. These White women rail against patriarchy while offering their backs for it to stand on. At the same time, they engage their own White privilege by overwhelmingly supporting white narratives. They consistently rep, edit, publish, promote, rec, and review White all the time. They literally cannot see anything else therefore nothing else is seen.

The White Dudes™ get a lot of attention in YA because 1) they're rarer and 2) Patriarchy. But tbh White women can cause much more harm.

It’s really quite simple. Privilege is the problem here, even more so than patriarchy. Once the women who actually run publishing industry get sick of this shit, take a hard look at their privilege, dismantle this system for real, and address its issues of diversity at the human resources level rather than just on the surface, then we might actually get somewhere.

The purpose of any MFA program is to grow writers. And Hamline’s MFAC program grows writers for children. More and more the children we are writing for come from diverse backgrounds. More and more they are from non-traditional, same-sex, or single parented families. It is vital that these children – whatever their race, orientation, gender identity, class, ability, or faith –see themselves in books, as heroes of their own stories, see that they are not alone. They need to find themselves in the words and characters and pages, and they need to feel, in the words of Julie Schumacher, “recognized and therefore relieved.” And we cannot do that, unless we create a safe space for writers of color and diverse voices. Read more here.

The long con of white mediocrity may never be exposed because there are too many people invested in making sure not a single instance of white excellence is overlooked but quickly drop the vigilance when it comes to the excellence of those of us who were never afforded such protection. But for those of us who didn’t grow up entitled, those of us who grew up underestimated, underinvited, undersolicited, underacknowledged, underloved, I say let’s expose each other’s excellence. Read more here.

As a diverse YA author I am often asked, usually by teens searching in vain for their own reflection in the novels they read, whether I think things will ever change. I do, mostly because I believe there is a limit to how long literature can peddle the fantasy of a non-diverse world to readers who are living in a diverse reality. Read more here.